46. The difference between hope and faith

A key practical matter for managers, practitioners and leaders.

Feb 07, 2024

Last week I wrote about the dangers of managerial pessimism and how positive expectations was the answer. This week I’m going one step further – looking at another key distinction, this time between hope and faith.

Hope and faith

I was listening to the radio during the festive season and was lucky enough to hear music pioneer Brian Eno being interviewed by singer-songwriter Ellie Goulding as part of her guest-edited Today programme on 28 December 2023. Eno came to prominence as part of Roxy Music in the early 1970s and has led a varied career in production, composition, technology and generally stretching the boundaries of what’s possible – a truly fascinating character. He is two generations older than Goulding, which made their exchanges even more interesting.

They got to talking about climate change and how Eno felt about the world’s response so far (at 13 minutes 33 seconds into this audio from the show).

Ellie Goulding: “I guess it’s this word hope we hear all the time.. I just wondered how you’re feeling right now about it.”

Brian Eno: “I have a religious friend who says to me ‘Hope’s no use really, what you need is faith’. And I kind of get what she’s saying. I’m an atheist myself but I sort of understand that if you have faith in something you actually believe it’s already there. It might not be manifest yet but it’s already there. If you have hope it’s like saying ‘I don’t think it’s there, I’m hoping that it will be in the future’. And she says ‘No, you have to act as though the world you want already exists – but we haven’t quite uncovered it yet.’ So I’m kind of on the fence between hope and faith at the moment.”

This is a very useful distinction, well put. Let’s explore it.

Working with hopes – with clients and colleagues

In Solution Focused (SF) work we ask our clients, those with whom we are working, about their best hopes. We are inviting them to move from wherever they are right now (which may be something like stuck, frustrated, negative, hopeless, angry, whatever) toward hopes for something better. For them at this point, it is indeed as Eno says that it’s not here yet - but they can hope that it might be sometime in the future. And then, of course, we then start to build towards that. As I wrote in The Next Generation of Solution Focused Practice (Routledge, 2021):

The Oxford dictionary definition of hope as a noun is:

a feeling of expectation and desire for a particular thing to happen

So for something to be a hope, is should be both desirable and somehow possible. This is quite subtle. A paradigmatic example is a client who has lost their arm in an accident. They may well ‘wish’ that their arm would return – but they cannot really ‘hope’ that it will (pending some dramatic development in medical and cyborg science).

A hope is a good place to start. A ‘best hope’ asks the client to think as big as they can, at the top end of the scale, for what might just conceivably be possible. One of the key elements of SF work is combining big thinking with tiny details and signs, and this is a place to encourage the client to think as big as they can.

Working with faith – in our clients and colleagues

A hope is the feeling of expectation and desire for something to happen. But faith, in Eno’s terms mentioned above, is the certainty that something is already there or will appear, even if it’s not manifest yet. And this is the starting point for us, the practitioner, the manager, the leader

We start from a position of faith; faith in the other person, that they can and will be able to move forward towards something better for them, in their own terms, in ways that they can recognise. That they can experience and feel the differences that appear. Our stance, our position, our questions, our presuppositions, are all based on this total expectation that something useful can and will (in time) emerge.

This is not simply hope. If we had hope for our client, there would always be the possibility that they couldn’t move forward. And then we’d have to keep that possibility open. And we’d be looking for it. And there would always be the risk that we get towards pessimism (as in last week’s piece).

This kind of faith as part of the Brief Therapy tradition

In the Next Generation book I look at the development of SF work since the first half of the 20^th century when pioneers like Gregory Bateson and later Milton Erickson developed their thinking about interactional (rather than internal) and resource-focused (rather than deficit focused) and individual (rather than diagnostic) work. A key period came in the 1950s and 1960s, when those who had worked with Bateson and Erickson struck out on their own with conjoint family therapy) and later brief therapy (broadly family therapy with only one person).

There are some key assumptions in this work that are still with us. From the longer list in the book, these assumptions are particularly relevant as we consider faith in the client(s) (page 25 in the book).

Taking the client’s ideas seriously from the start, and sticking with them
A keen interest in specific, concrete, interactional details from the client
‘Thinking small’ in terms of the details of the complaint and potential courses of action
The idea that a change now, here in the present, is sufficient to move things along.

Perhaps the last one of these is the most important. We hold tight the idea that something now, today, in the present, can help things develop in useful ways for the clients and others. We hold the idea that the client’s ideas, skills, abilities, resources, and tiny details will help us move towards that. And we hold that the client will be able to recognise the value of these things, either now or in the very near future.

Conclusions

A lot of the writing about faith is, inevitably, grounded in religious thinking. There are articles from here to eternity proposing that we have faith in [insert deity here] and all will be well. I am proposing that faith in our clients and colleagues, is key in building constructive relationships and futures together. And, of course, if religious faith helps you, please use it! And if it doesn’t, try faith in others around you and see what difference that might make. For humane and effective organisations, it’s a key foundation.

Dates and Mates

Jenny and I are planning to be at the Australasian Solution Focused Association conference near Sydney on 12-15 September 2024, and also at the SF conference in Singapore on 26-27 September 2024. It would be great to see you there.

The annual international online SF24 event has just been announced for Friday 3 May 2024 (which is also SF World Day). This 24-hour event connects SF practitioners and researchers and anyone who’s involved (or just interested) in SF work. It’s free to join and and an inspiring way to connect. You can register now and get more information.